Yes! And also, the urge for a rapid answer is ideological. Never has the origin of a virus happened in a year. Or two. The Spanish flu was from Kansas. Ten years after the fact SARS is mostly proven to be from bats. https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=27551349&goto=threads%.... MERS, similarly the origin is from African Bats but the actual precise location is still being investigated. The impulse to answer now, in 90 days or even to answer in the next decade is cultural and being leveraged and weaponized in every direction. The answer is: We cannot know and do not know and won't know for a long time. Any kind of accusation or speculation, especially against America or China has the chilling effect of destroying any possible evidence. Perhaps that is in effect the point. How can China or America or X prove the negative? This is a weaponized geo-political conversation precisely because the politics is forbidden into the framework of the conversation that is, at its outset, profoundly political and ideological.
I care why because it is a complete and ideologically rationalized tax dodge: LET US NOT tax the rich because they are morally superior (proven by their meritocratic rise) so we can count on them to donate some of their money and that redistributes wealth! Which is to say, that which you call cynical, is merely resisting western ideological assumptions that pull our subconscious strings.
The purpose of NFT's is money laundering. When minted off chain (see Beeple's headline sale/ad). Moreover, Financial Nihlism is a rich philosophical subject reduced and fixed here in a way that kills understanding. What response should a population or group do when the written rules say you are free but the unwritten rules, that say you are to accept the caste position you were born in with zero wage growth or chance at middle class because you are to blame as an individual? If you break the unwritten rules you are dismissed as nihilist. Perhaps nihilism is the only way to break the religious thinking of our economic system where we dare not speak the devils name aka any kind of economic system that is not capitalism. I am very serious here, what should we do? Just accept what appears to me to be closer to feudalism in practice but we desperately keep trying to reclaim it. Capitalism stopped in 2007, didn't it?
The lab leak hypothesis can arise after pandemics because humans need an explanation to feel safe from the chaos of "nature (as) the biggest bio-terrorist". Coupled with the general poor science education, people soothe themselves with conspiracies. It's fine, so long as it doesn't get leveraged by empire for war against economic enemies.
Yes! This. Consideration of the repo markets without understanding Eurodollars means the entire conversation is meaningless. There is not enough GOOD collateral. Treasuries are the only thing banks trust because they know how fragile everything is (rehypothecations, nake shorts). This is the continuation of the '08 crash, not a new one.
Historically, serfs who were convinced by their ruling lords, that they were free, believed in hard work. The biggest difference from today is, in late feudalism, serfs had more holidays than us: Indeed, if we’re to believe Dr Lynn Parramore, senior research analyst at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, we’re working a lot harder than medieval peasants did. “Ploughing and harvesting were backbreaking toil,” she says, “but the peasant enjoyed anywhere from eight weeks to half the year off.”https://www.smh.com.au/business/workplace/compared-to-you-an...
Crypto is the next reframing of the repo market regular cycle of failures. Virtual money is not new, it's what the eurodollar system is (US dollars outside of the US also called shadow bank system that know one knows the value of). The offer on hand will be that blockchain will help keep track of the liquidity and rehypothecation; in reality it is yet another patching of an economic system that more closely resembles feudalism than capitalism. (Perry Anderson, Jeffrey P. Snider, Yanis Varofakis).
The relevant question is why does the search for aliens/ufo's remain in our customs. The one 100% certain thing is that humans have for centuries needed to see something mysterious in the sky. Our metanarrative, as "first world", means that when we do this universal human questioning as we build our symbollic reality, it must originate from 'objective' categories like science and governments and military and not religion.
It is easy to claim the opposite using this binaric logic: The US has lost the covid war to China with the most deaths in the world. The desperate fear of China's economic dominance which seems unstoppable alongside the fact that they do not invade and bomb countries (so if we do that to them we will have a really big propaganda job to convince people). So how do we convince China is really bad? Oh I know. Leak a deadly virus near their lab. Frame them. Keep it in your back pocket in case the cultural genocide framing fails. This is why these polemics lead nowhere. Rather, we have no evidence conclusive either way. The desire to speculate from our side, only feeds anti-Asian attitudes.
"Only in history books and Mark Twain stories is the patent still a symbol of a fair, short-term deal between inventors and society, based on temporary reward for the long-term diffusion of knowledge for broad social benefit." - I guess we can add one more place to the list.
The actual worst part is you are also describing us:World Uyghur Congress is funded by NED and one should at least query this? , "Depending on whom you ask, the NED is either a nonprofit champion of liberty or an ideologically driven meddler in world affairs." https://www.ned.org/wp-content/themes/ned/search/grant-searc...
There is no money now. What is the definition of money? A timed deposit? An entry? It's a relationship, an IOU. That's why we need PR people (Central Bankers) to keep the faith. They don't control 'money' because what is it? Where is it? The Eurodollar market is not even calculable.
What is free speech? I argue it is not even a concept. Concepts divide people. There is no person against free speech. Please don't bring up Russia and China. I've been to these countries and people they cherish free speech;they just have freely spoken to have an explicit authoritarian ruler. Free speech is conversation to have out of laziness.
I'm part of a think tank (not for or against Bitcoin) speculating on what, from an analytic/continental philosophy tradition. Stuff like: Universality and its species: The Market is the empty universal element that contains the Money Market (aka banks, hedge funds and day traders) but also its species of particulars that fail to be contained by the Money Market: the Real Economy. The Real Economy concerns the production, purchase and flow of goods and services within an economy. (Laclau). Crypto is the antagonism between the particular element (The Market) which hegemonizes universality and the element (the Real Economy) which, within this universality stands for what is excluded from it.
Object cause of desire and subjectivity is part of analytic philosophy and if one is interested in this topic Lacan, Hegel, Zupančič, Zizek, Dolar and Agamben are useful and, for example the book Sex and the Failed Absolute (Zizek) is a beautifully structured argument connecting quantum physics (mobius, cross cap, klein bottle) to the incompleteness of human subjectivity and the structure of desire.
It is. The cultural difference between Canadians and Americans is we worry about that difference, are taught to in school. The economic difference is we have healthcare, so don't fear getting sick in the same register of horror.
Agreed. I take it to the end here and argue that what it is to be a free human is to make cuts to the regular order of functioning power instead, in other words to ask whatever powers preside over the order we are born to 'am I what you say I am' and to keep power afraid of human solidarity in the struggle to be against power.
My boss Lenny at the Innis Film Library at the University of Toronto ( also T1 internet in '94 ) told me his meeting of Francis Bacon: Lenny was walking down the stairs at MOMA and someone walking with a cane was coming up the stairs. The man walked past Lenny and smacked him withe the cane. Lenny looked up and saw that it was Bacon. Bacon saw that Lenny was looking at him and told him to fuck off.
Yes! I did not eat in a restaurant for 15 years. It helped my family never did so I did not miss it. Perhaps a tip for people trying to future-proof their kids for economic depression.